The Japanese hibakusha movement began in 1956, a decade after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombings, when the survivors decided to band together to inform the world about the sheer brutality of nuclear bombs and their inconceivable damage. Nihon Hidankyo, a federation of hibakusha organisations, was founded that year, at the second World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs held in response to ongoing US nuclear tests.
This year, 68 years later, Nihon Hidankyo was given the Nobel Peace Prize—which it has richly deserved for at least half a century. The hibakusha, who in July 2017 ratified the adoption of a proposed ‘Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’, have a long, storied history. This is how it began.
Days after the bombings in August 1945, photographers from a Japanese newsreel service, Nippon Eigasha (Japan Movie Corporation), shot extensive black-and-white footage in the two cities. The US then sent in First Lieutenant Daniel McGovern to make colour films. He was conscientised by what he saw as the inscrutable sufferings of the Japanese. Later that year, the US military halted filming by Nippon Eigasha.
In March-April 1946, the Americans seized the Japanese newsreel team’s footage for shipment to the US. McGovern was ordered back to the mainland in June 1946. He later told NBS—in its revelatory November 2023 documentary, Atomic Cover-Up—that he “hand-carried to the US the negative and a print of the Japanese black-and-white film”. He was told that “this material could not be released to the news media nor to the general public”.
The Japanese newsreel footage remained buried until 1970, when a 16-minute film titled Hiroshima-Nagasaki: August, 1945 was aired on US public television. But McGovern’s own colour footage, 90,000 feet of it, remained unseen. In February 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission first classified the footage as ‘Secret’ and then elevated it to ‘Top Secret’.
In 1982, the Japanese began a grassroots movement named the Ten-Feet Campaign—named after tens of thousands of Japanese who emptied their savings to buy from the US government the black-and-white footage, including that shot from the bombers, for $10 per foot.
This was the footage sent by the hibakusha to a group of us who had banded together in Bombay in 1983 under the rubric of GROUND (Group for Nuclear Disarmament). Its members were youth—journalists and college students—who went round to schools showing students the film and discussing with them the imperative for denuclearisation in the subcontinent.
Despite its growing popularity, GROUND died early. Communists first took membership in droves and took over the functioning, forcing the dismantling of the group—not because of any fundamental opposition to subcontinental denuclearisation but motivated by doctrinairism, because GROUND had been started by anti-Stalinist Trotskyites.
The hibakusha were known worldwide. So, why were they chosen this year? Could it be the Nobel Peace Prize’s longtime politicisation, history of purblindness, and sheer opportunism? Among the undeserving but politically expedient figures who received it were 1973’s Henry Kissinger (the grey eminence commonly known as the Butcher of Vietnam). Aung San Suu Kyi was given the award in 1991 “for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights”, but her obdurate silence years later on the Rohingya crisis provoked demands for its recall.
Barack Obama received the prize in 2009 on the 12th day of his presidency, long before he had the creds to deserve it. He got the Nobel for his “tremendous efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”, but his acceptance speech was all about a “just war”—and, in the following years, he became one of the most warmongering of US presidents. The disgruntled former director of the Nobel Institute wrote in his autobiography that the Nobel committee had hoped to proactively “strengthen the president”.
What do the hibakusha have to do with the political utilitarianism of the Nobel committee? Think Iran, Russia, North Korea—and think the US, which has been stoking these conflicts from their various beginnings and has the most to gain from them, whichever way they go. In May 2024, Iran announced that while it had “no decision to build a nuclear bomb, but…in the case of an attack on our nuclear facilities by the Zionist regime, our deterrence will change”.
According to the global diplomatic buzz, Israel has never been closer than today to exercising upon Iran its Samson Option—massive retaliation with nukes, of which it reportedly has many in cruise missiles, aircraft, artillery and atomic landmines in the Golan Heights. In August 2024, Russia obliquely hinted at a possible nuclear response to Ukraine attacking its nuclear facilities. North Korea’s latest threat to use nuclear weapons against South Korea was issued barely a week ago.
Never before has the world been closer to multilocational nuclear wars. But no one wants nukes—not even the Western military-industrial complex fattened on a century of wars, because a nuclear war would end the military-industrial complex.
Even Toshiyuki Mimaki, co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, seemed nonplussed by the Nobel Peace Prize. “In Gaza, bleeding children are being held (by their parents). It’s like Japan 80 years ago.” He said that “the dedicated individuals working in Gaza” should have received it, specifically mentioning the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which was also a nominee.
This is why we have this paradox: giving the Peace Prize to an exemplary awardee, but with a political motivation.
Kajal Basu
Veteran journalist
(Views are personal)
(kajalrbasu@gmail.com)